Oral History of the Zombie War: Supplemental Stories
by BetaBrass
Summary: Excavating stories is working with a rusty tap. A struggle to get people to call back, trust me, talk to me. Once I manage to turn the faucet, to unclog whatever blockage was there, the tumult bursts out and the people, their stories and their lives don't stop. I am honored and overwhelmed at the magnitude of this mission to fill in just a few more gaps during the Z Plague.
1. Chapter 1 - Tate

**Author Notes: It would be an impractical task, and a boring read, to list all of the characters that I created versus the characters that belong to their creator, Max Brooks. If you have read the book and someone seems familiar, they likely are. If not, I have tried to outline reasonable additions to Brooks' work..**

The following narrator is owned by Max Brooks, although he never names her and only mentions her through the narration of his character Breckinridge "Breck" Scott. I decided to put her in Oregon, which was in a "relatively" safe region in the world along the United States West Coast, where she might have survived while continuing her work.

For any readers who have not read the book and have stumbled upon this fiction, I have tried to both stay true to the source material while also remaining accessible to those unfamiliar with the book. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly encourage it to anyone and everyone.

I first read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks a few years back, when I was in high school. I recently retrieved it from my shelf and I found once again that I could not put it down. The style of a transcripted interview to create a fabric of different narratives from different people was well executed around a strong foundation of source material. Each character had their own pre-war identity and background. They tell their story of the Zombie apocalypse with their individual voices, each bringing their own inherent biases.

* * *

 **Portland, Oregon**

 **[Kelli Tate invites me inside the Portland-area house from the rain. Her exact location is kept sensitive, as her notoriety for revealing Breckinridge "Breck" Scott's fraudulent vaccine, Phalanx, has earned her some lasting animosities. She seems unconcerned whether people learn her location. "It's mostly for my husband. He worries. The greedy assholes will get what's coming to them." She remains as photogenic today as the pictures on the wall show her in the days before the war. Pictures include days before the war as a student, and more recent ones with her husband, son and nieces and nephews. ]**

I take it you've read up on some of the things Breckinridge Scott has written about me?

 **[Pause. She pours us coffee and sits down.]**

 **Some would call it vitriol. Others say that you caused the Great Panic.**

It was definitely vitriolic. Sexist, too. Mr. Scott wanted to squeeze the last riches from the teat before it dried up, and I exposed his scam before he could finish cashing in on public misinformation. It doesn't matter that he wasn't the specific person who called it African rabies; he had both the resources and the responsibility to fact-check his product and he deliberately refused. And, yes, I do think my story did send us over the threshold into the Great Panic. So, true on both counts. But let's be clear on this point: We were already headed for the Great Panic. The US, Chinese, South African, British governments, the CDC, WHO, you name it - even with all of these actors working together to keep a lid on the spread, that ship had sailed. There was no possibility left of a quiet clean up of the cases of infected. Hell, even if they did everything right, with uncontrolled borders, the diaspora, the organ donations … Once we reached the point of spread to our second, third, fourth continent there was no "right" thing to do that could prevent what unfolded.

 **So, you don't think earlier government actions would have offset what happened?**

Offset our losses? Yes, we could have maybe saved more people. Had a higher global percentage of survival. No one knows the future. It's why, even though I'm the one who broke the story and had an advantage over most to plan ahead, I still spent my days trying to write articles while providing childcare for parents whose work was more important towards the war effort. That's why it is vital that we prepare for as many eventualities as possible. But, tell me, how much have you looked into other epidemics? I've spent the last couple years going over comparisons between the zombie plague and the spanish flu, the AIDS pandemic … well, we had a sort of perfect storm.

 **Meaning?**

The zombie plague had several factors that we had technically dealt with before as far as spreading diseases and infections. But not all together, and certainly not with quite as active a mechanism for spread. For one thing, it had the infectiousness and virulence of the Spanish flu. Just look up graphs of world population deaths in a timeline, and you'll see large spikes for World War I and World War II. The spike in between? Spanish flu. Highly successful virus, and deadly, though not quite the death sentence as Z Plague. But it transmitted, incubated and killed quickly, meaning it closed the circle too quickly to infect as many people as it otherwise could have. We really lucked out with that one. Relatively speaking.

Then you have the AIDS pandemic. Our infrastructure in academia and virology helped us track down the origins of what was considered to be a mysterious killer of gays in urban areas right back to the specific river system and primates. Unlike other diseases, the development of HIV/AIDS takes longer, and symptoms even longer after that. That is, if it happened at all, so by the time people started noticing anything wrong, unknown numbers of people had been exposed. Add to that the confusion over how it was transmitted, with people claiming God was punishing gays, only to have three year old children diagnosed because they needed a blood transfusion. It's no wonder the 80s and 90s were so turbulent with that one.

Then there was that big ebola outbreak a little before Z Plague. Ah, Ebola. **[She sits back and fiddles with her mug.]** Remember? They ran out of body bags, people were dropping so fast. But once they dropped, they stayed down. **[Pause.]** With respect to that one, we all had a solid understanding of what ebola is at the viral level, how it transmits, incubation periods, treatment plans, survival expectations, et cetera. Even though there wasn't, and still isn't, a cure for ebola, we knew precisely how to contain that one. There wasn't quite enough news coverage on that particular outbreak to fully inform people, but it was alright relative to other events. It fell through with government response. After that, governments had a chance to get their act in gear. A mere couple years later, signs of the Z Plague are popping up and what do governments do? Listen to the private interests that line their retirement funds. Business as usual.

Z Plague is different. Infection is based on bites, so it's immediate and definite, rather than a guessing game of statistics. In a way, it makes things more clear cut, whereas exposure to HIV or AIDS may or may not ever develop into anything, and that requires a test which takes time. The Z Plague's incubation period was variable and generally longer before the Panic, when many of the cases in North America were organ donations. This meant tracking connections and understanding how infections spread was that much harder. Once bite infections became more common in North America, we began to understand how it was contracted and transmitted. But that understanding came too late to use towards curbing its spread once the panic had set in.

 **[Sheepish silence.]**

I just realized I never let you ask your own questions. You can cut that first bit out and ask the questions you came here to ask.

 **That's fine. I came here to ask you how you were able to write this story. You were 25 at the time, a recent college graduate and in your first position as a journalist.**

 **[Silence.]**

 **I'm just trying to get an idea of how you knew you were onto something. What drew your attention to Phalanx?**

Isn't it obvious? I was trying to understand this African rabies outbreak. I mean, come on. What case of rabies has ever escalated to that level where the population is encouraged to get a preemptive vaccination? Normally, you only get a rabies vaccine after you've come into contact with an infected, or suspected, rabid animal. There's a period of time in which you can get the vaccine after your exposure, and it will still work. Same with AIDS. Now, entire populations are suddenly told that there's a big bad new bug out there and caution is necessary, but we also happen to have the cure on hand? Any high school student in a beginning journalism class would small that one.

 **What form of sources did you use? Public records, other journalists, CDC … ?**

… As a journalist, I need to use caution in divulging any kind of information regarding potential sources. I can tell you that once I found the right direction, following the money wasn't hard. And once I had a better idea of the cover up that was happening, it wasn't hard to pick a place where an outbreak had occurred and take a flight. That's why my initial piece took as long as it did to break the scandal. I needed to fly to China, to Brazil, to Pakistan and find people who might not know what was happening, but sure as hell knew this was no case of rabies or psychosis. Ultimately, there isn't a whole lot I can personally tell you. I just passed things along to an unaware public who deserved information.

 **How did you get those interviews?**

Oh, you know. People who knew people who had friends. That kind of thing.

 **Can you tell me what some of those interviewees said? Had any of them gotten the Phalanx vaccine?**

Many of them actually had as time went on. Or if they hadn't, they knew people who'd had it but turned, anyway. Ultimately, it was all hearsay, but it added some needed anecdotal evidence to make people listen to the data I'd collected.

One man I spoke to was a ranking official in the Chinese government. The kind of guy who didn't seem too verbose, but I'd barely sat down in his living room when he launched into a monologue about how I couldn't release his name, or even his city, but that everyone was in danger. He gave me a heavily redacted account of what he knew of this new disease.

 **Redacted?**

He wanted the world to be warned about the coming storm. He was high enough in the chain to have access to a good amount of information and he and some of his colleagues were connecting enough dots to not like the picture. But he wasn't high enough to have much say in decisions. He was loyal to his country, but he was also invested in his family's future. If another country could keep it together, could act soon enough, it might be enough to save his family. He wanted information to get out there, but he wasn't going to sell out is country and colleagues to do it. He and his colleagues had children going to school in the US, Canada, the UK.

He and one of his friends had spent years arranging for their son to marry his daughter. She was a student, but was already successful, well-placed in society, drop-dead gorgeous. Then all of a sudden, his friend puts a stop the the marriage and forces his son to marry some no-name chick from Delaware for the citizenship. At first, my guy was confused and angry, offended at the sudden stiff. Then, he started to realize the reasons behind it. **[Considers.]** I think he also felt better that the friend's son seemed to have gotten the short end of that deal.

My guy showed me a picture from the wedding on his phone from facebook[1] and no joke, I almost shit myself trying to hold in the laughter. My guy's almost-son-in-law was a handsome guy, so he and the interveiwee's daughter would have had the hottest babies ever born. And this poor kid suddenly has his dad all over his ass to marry this, frankly, less than desirable woman who has, for some reason, agreed to marry a guy she doesn't know from China. Probably money, although bribery was never mentioned. I've gotta say I never thought I'd learn about mail-order grooms while researching vaccinations. Anyway.

He'd just about had enough of the inaction, the cover up upon cover up, when he and some colleagues went to visit a site. They were in a facility to receive a briefing on what their scientists had learned from several of the Patient Zeroes they'd obtained a while back. The scene he described was that of a horror movie. There they are, standing behind the glass that looks into the lab with several of the "patients," and the researchers are giving a presentation through the glass, speaking into a microphone that speaks into the observation room. They'd strapped the patient down and were referring to some MRI scans. They were wrapping the presentation up, it was almost over. The rest of the patients are in a kind of glass pen to, I don't know, show that they're mobile and can stand or something. Maybe it was just for dramatic effect.

One of the, uh, … they must have been an older one, and it had been a teenager anyway, and the restraints were meant for adults. It basically translated to a looser cuff, which meant that the kid's wrist couldn't get free, but there was enough space to wear on the tissues, which were already decayed some. Eventually, the kid's wrist and ankles had been rubbed and chafed so much over the last couple years, that it's not surprising he finally got free. Do you know what ring avulsion[2] is?

 **Uh, no. What is it?**

You should look it up after this interview. Don't eat before you see pictures, unless you saw a lot during the war and you're not bothered by that kind of thing. Short answer, this kid did it to his whole hand. Pulled the skin and connective tissues on his hands off like a glove being pulled inside out. Same thing with one of his feet, and the cuff of the other foot detached from the gurney. The cuff detached, so these scientists and doctors, the people who know more about what's happening than probably anyone else in the world at the time, they rush to the foot of the gurney to hold his leg down while someone, I don't know, looks for duct tape.

Logically, a loose leg isn't a big deal, seeing as it's the arms and head you need to watch for, but these were the early days, right? And, as smart and cutting edge as these scientists are, they were just as prone to mistakes as anyone else. So, they're at the foot of the bed and that's when the zombie pulls at the right angle and sits up, and these skinless hands grab the nearest doctor by the back of their head. Drags this guy by the hair to his mouth. They'd taken it's gag out for the presentation, to better show the patient's state and physical tendencies. Bites part of the doctor's scalp and ear clean off. Another researcher, stupid, really, gets between them to save the doctor. Gets bitten on the arm. A technician wearing gloves tries to put the gag back into the zombie's mouth. The tech gets his fingers taken off, glove included.

This was before there was a true understanding of the gravity of this plague. They had armed security, but they weren't permitted in the contamination zone for security clearance issues. It was all very bureaucratic, apparently. A simple request form would have permitted armed security to stand just outside in the hallway. It would have been approved, too, seeing as a bunch of government officials were visiting that day, and would have merited the beefed up firepower. **[Pause.]** That's not entirely fair. Even if they had been a step away, they probably would have been given the priority of protecting the researchers, but they also would have been instructed not to harm the patients, so it probably would have just led to more infections.

When the soldiers finally haul themselves across the building and up a flight of stairs, they get into the lab and the kid has gotten out of the gurney. It's weak, missing most of his foot, so it's hobbling around, and not really a threat on the scale of it. Some of the staff are running away, terrified of exposure, since they didn't all have gloves on, and some are rushing in, trying to treat the injured, but avoid the patient. The kid isn't moving very well, but at that point, people are freaked out and don't know what to do. The chaos is exciting the others in the pen, and now they're pressing on the glass all together.

Remember, this glass wouldn't have been tempered with anything. It was an indoor window, meant to stop germs, microbes, not a physical attack. Just as some of the scientists and soldiers are dog piling the kid, the glass breaks and the eight of them in the pen spill out over the room. That's when my interviewee's boss has had enough. Up until then, the people in the observation room had been transfixed like in a horrific show. His boss hits the speakers and orders the soldiers to screw the patients and put them down. There were plenty more where the infected came from that they could study, and there was no intrinsic value in these particular subjects.

Up until then, they didn't know how to truly stop them. They were so wrapped up in studying them in general, in understanding what had happened at the biochemical level, so confused at the contradiction to every biological law. They were obsessed with learning more, running tests with the ultimate goal of a cure. Death was no longer the "death sentence" it once was, so perhaps a reversal of the condition didn't seem so crazy. They never stopped to ask themselves how to put them down for good. Didn't know that destroying the brain was the only killswitch.

Even if they had, the people best able to figure it out were on the floor, being gnawed on. The soldiers would have been least likely to know to go for the brain.

The soldiers didn't want to hit the scientists, so they had to aim carefully, which was difficult with the zombies already chewing on many of the researchers and the soldiers' own comrades, everyone writhing and rolling all over the place. They shot center body mass. They tried to pepper them with multiple shots. Shot them so many times and grew so desperate that eventually, headshots killed them all, but they still didn't know that they only needed one bullet per kill.

After the barrage, there was dead silence. The researchers were all either dead or had fled the lab, never expecting this much action in their lives. The soldiers were assigned to provide security for what was just another government building. They could be posted at any number of locations, including government labs with floors upon floors of braniacs and freezers filled with anything from the measles to feline leukemia to the common cold. They weren't the elite teams trained for any and every eventuality. My interviewee and his colleagues were pencil pushers who'd studied enough, and been wealthy enough, to afford the right education and connections to ensure they never needed to see such kinds of action. Between the pencil pushers, pipetters and soldiers, no one was qualified to react to something like this.

Then the doctor, missing his ear, stood up. His surgical mask dangled from the one ear he still had. He was covered in the dark, clumped innards of the dead, but also of his own blood, since he'd received several rounds by accident. His mouth opened, and for a moment it looked to everyone like he would give some final nugget of wisdom or, at the very least, a pleading request to solve this problem or care for his family. Instead, that horrible moan came out and he shuffled towards one of the two remaining soldiers. The first wave of action in the lab was scary enough, but it was so unexpected that everyone was either too stunned to move or with it enough to run. This time, the two soldiers kept shooting the doctor. One had switched to his handgun, having jammed his rifle. They had stepped behind a gurney to get it between them and the doctor, but that meant it lined up the observation room window right behind the doctor from the soldiers. Bullets hit the observation window, and everyone was sprayed with glass and fluids. My interviewee probably won the lottery to have not been cut and infected from that.

They finally blew up the doctor's head, adding brains to everyone's attire, and my interviewee's boss again had the presence of mind to order the soldiers and everyone into the hallway, where they locked the doors behind them. From there, my interviewee went straight home, didn't care that he was freaking people out on the street. He got home, packed his daughter a bag and told her to head to school early, which was out of the country, and that he would pack more of her things and mail them after her, but he was sending her on the first flight he could book. He packed his wife a bag and told her to head to her nephew's place in Australia. She was a doctor and wasn't going to just leave, so they compromised that she'd leave at some point later, especially because she worked in the prenatal ward, which rarely had emergency patients, certainly not that kind, and was physically removed from the infectious disease floors.

 **And none of this went in the news, even locally? What about the families of those who died?**

Deaths can be covered up, at least the cause of death, anyway. It's been done before, so I imagine it wouldn't have been too difficult for a government to pull off. As for the regular news, too easy. It's true that there's a certain level of required documentation for incident reports in those types of facilities, and reports are passed up. The point of a report is that it will go somewhere, be read by someone, so the more places it could hypothetically be seen is a factor there. But even if you got your hands on an incident report with keywords like outbreak and exposure, who cared whether some researcher who spend their days cataloging and pipetting in a lab sticks themselves with a needle by accident? Unless you care enough and both have that kind of access and know what you're looking for, good luck.

Protocols exist in labs like that one, the CDC and all over the world. That hasn't stopped outbreaks of all types of diseases in labs, and those are downplayed all the time. You think governments didn't invest in weaponizing viruses? And how could that be accomplished without messing around and factoring in risk? I never got my hands on evidence of tossing weaponized viruses around willy nilly, but I wouldn't put it past them, either.

Prewar, people would regularly take some serial-killing virus out of the freezer and spend the day playing with it. Mistakes can and will be made - it's debatable whether you should even bother researching outbreaks in labs. I have. It reads like the stuff of nightmares. Today, especially in light of the resurgence of many diseases that had previously been eliminated in the US, scientists fiddle with any number of diseases in petri dishes on a daily basis.

Wartime and postwar lab outbreaks are scary, too. Did you know that, in the US, they needed to clear CDC facilities while wearing hazmat[3] suits? Most hospitals didn't actively store infectious diseases, but many had something stored somewhere. Even the dead have some water content and, therefore, the capacity to host disease. Every room, every closet, every freezer needed to be cleared. And the vast majority of those freezers hadn't had working generators in years by the time front reached them. Some of the world's worst diseases were probably free-floating around the building, sticking to every mouth breather, so avoiding any spray was more crucial than ever.

During the march across, they almost never had enough qualified personnel to clear those buildings. They needed people who were qualified and fastidious enough to dress and undress in hazmat suits. They needed to be people who wouldn't take shortcuts, and who had the background knowledge to lock down those freezers, labs, floors, wings and buildings and follow sterilization protocols so they could leave the facility for when the government could devote more time and people to dealing with it all. Then, they needed to be able to do the deed of actually clearing a building of zombies. Close quarters, indoors with no electricity so it's dark. And those suits get really hot, really fast, and heat stroke becomes a risk. A lot of the zombies were helmeted military from before the pullout and change in uniforms, which drastically complicated how you'd take them down.

Dark twisting hallways, the worst diseases humans have ever had floating around, lots and lots of zombies and a lot of them are wearing armor. How many people, out of the surviving population, would have had that basic knowledge, attention to detail bordering on OCD[4] and the physical ability to take down zombies in the least desirable conditions? Not nearly enough, that's how many. Mostly, the military opted to construct special barriers around the facility and keep going, leaving it under guard until a qualified group could be cobbled together to do it. Took years.

 **You've become one of the preeminent journalists for covering diseases and other related topics. Is it more out of initial interest or because of your extensive experience in the area?**

Both, I imagine. I needed to spend a lot of time relearning basic biology in order to understand everything, so that opened more doors for me. I was 25, and recently out of college, after all, so crazy hours spent researching was nothing new. The interest was pretty clear cut, given that the world was literally spiraling out of control.

I interviewed others, too, and they provided continued human interest for me. Another contact was from Karachi, which didn't have it that bad, yet, but they had extended family staying with them. They were from the rural, more mountainous region where certain kinds of foot traffic was just starting up. These anecdotes, while I couldn't share them in their entirety for many reasons, including the fact they were long and they'd be hearsay, gave me a better idea of what we were dealing with. It made the notion that a vaccine could possibly prevent something like this skeptical at best. Clearly, it couldn't protect you from being eaten.

 **I've heard that someone specifically came to you with suspicions of both the fraudulent vaccine and concerns for a larger danger than a minor epidemic virus, including some excerpts from the Warmbrunn-Knight Report.**

I see.

 **[Concentrates on refolding her napkin. Sips at coffee, which has grown cold.]**

 **In your whistleblowing publication, you included materials and documents that were not from the Warmbrunn-Knight Report. Including compiled maps of known cases over time that showed it had grown to pandemic levels. There were also memos that discussed no discernable change in rates of infection between populations with and without Phalanx vaccinations. Documents like these would have to have come from someone with government access to raw data, rather than estimates and averages provided to the mainstream media outlets.**

 **[Laughter. Somewhat strained.]**

Well, … it is, refreshing to speak with someone who has put this much thought and preparation into an interview. What you need to understand is that the breaking story only had so much data. Solid, but finite. Once people started listening, though, that's when the doors opened for me, and I was able to publish follow-up pieces to more fully inform people. Any initial sources I may have had served to crack the door.

 **This is a picture of you and your family? Your husband? [Kelli Tate, with an unassuming man and another couple in uniform sit together, each adult with an infant or small child in their arms. Together with a mongrel at their heels, they share looks of subdued calm, framed in front of the same Portland area house we are currently in.]**

That was taken about a year before VA day. We were lucky as a couple. We had started dating before the war, and we both made it through. Many didn't. Most.

 **By the time you were dating, your husband contracted with intelligence departments, had some exposure to mapping software and was also doing contract work for the pharmaceutical company that developed Phalanx, didn't he?**

 **[Silence. Runs finger over the photo frame, clumping dust from the surface.]**

We were lucky, as a couple. Before, I don't think either of us were planning for the future beyond paying off loans. I never thought about caring for children much before, much less having them. Then, during the war, it wasn't just something to do for the war effort, or supporting family members on the lines. It turned into planning for the future. Talk about offsetting our losses.

Look, any potential sources I had from that exposition piece are, in theory, protected by laws designed to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers. They weren't working too well in the years preceding the war. As it stands now, the government doesn't have the time, resources or public support to conduct a witch hunt to prosecute someone whom many even in the government would see as a heroic figure. We don't know how the tides could turn in the future on that front. If such a source were to express any interest to me in speaking with you, I'll let you know.

[1] A pre-war social networking site. Currently, it and other sites are being data-mined from some of the very few intact server farms to aid in the investigation of identity fraud.

[2] Ring avulsion: An injury to the finger that occurs as a result of wearing a ring. When the ring is forcefully pulled it causes the ring to pull on the tissues, leading to skin and soft tissue damage.

[3] Hazmat: A contraction of hazardous materials. A hazmat suit is worn to handle hazardous materials without exposing the wearer to the potentially harmful environment.

[4] OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a frequently diagnosed disorder before the war.


	2. Chapter 2 - Barrett

**Portland, Oregon**

 **Linden Barrett is shorter than most men and slenderly built. The pre-war photo in his file shows the classically thin computer nerd. Today, he turns 42 and, like many of his generation, he moves with a wiry strength, smooth yet tired. His wife is making the birthday meal in the kitchen, so we sit on the back porch, which is screened from insects and somewhat loud from the rainfall.**

 **Thank you for speaking with me, especially so soon. I'm interested in what you can tell me about the lead up to the story that broke the news on Phalanx as a scam-**

You're looking for people's stories, right? I was a millennial. I guess we'll start there. Socioeconomically, I was a lower middle class white American male millennial. What does that mean? When the recession[1] hit, I was getting college acceptance letters and I was supposed to pick one and figure out how to pay for it. Even with scholarships, I couldn't pay for it all. Then, I was supposed to graduate with more debt than a Depression-era german could carry in a U-Hall. I was supposed to pay my debt by finding a job in an economy with no jobs available.

I was lucky, as far as things went. I majored in computer science and had a job waiting for me when I started my senior year. While many of my friends had to hang their debt on making espressos or waiting tables, my starting salary was more than my dad's after working 40 years at the same place. He was a social worker who worked with kids, so that's no surprise, really.

 **[Pause. Linden glances back towards the living room, where pictures of his and his wife's lives before the war hang. A particular photo hangs prominently, of a family with warm faces, including a very young, fair haired Linden. Clears throat.]**

So, I was lucky. I worked for a group that did contracts all over the industry. I did some contract work for a lot of the major companies, some state and federal agencies and so forth. My roommate, a friend from college, was in a similar position with having a good job as an accountant and doing well on paying off loans. Almost a year out of college, and I started living a little bit, even dating a little. I had no dependents to support and was making so much that I was happy to just be for a while. Just work, pay off my debt, and be. Comforted that I had it good.

 **But then you got interested in maps, public health?**

It was more of a side interest, really. My younger sister was in college and spent a semester working with a professor from the geography department. She was taking a seminar in GIS[2], although none of us knew why she'd suddenly become so interested for some time.

 **You mean she had specific plans?**

Eventually, yeah, with help from friends. She told me at the end of her junior year in college. She was planning on joining the Chair Force[3] so she could be the change she wanted to see. She went to a fancy all women's college back East. As bleak as it was for me to go to college under the cloud of recession, the cost of my college took most everything my family had, financially, even with scholarships and grants. There was no way we could afford her education unless the school could offset the cost. We'd been pushed to succeed in school all our childhoods, and I was the older sibling, always setting the bar. She already grew up trying to meet to this unrealistic image of me she had constructed. The always perfect student which, by the way, I wasn't. By the time she was applying to schools, our parents were financially spent, and they would have been lucky to afford the local university's in-state tuition.

Anyway, when we were growing up, college wasn't an option in our family, it was expected. More, even. It was required. So, when she was in high school, the recession was in full swing, our dad was constantly worried about being laid off, our mom was unemployed and couldn't find work. It lit a spark and she worked really hard in class. She did every extracurricular[4]. She was chief editor of a school literary magazine, played a rare sport, did theater, volunteered in the community, you name it. Long story short, she ended up heading back East for college. East Coast schools were older and could usually afford the best financial aid back then. It was really diverse, with students from all over the world.

She had a roommate from … I'm not sure I should say, actually. Let's just say she was from the Eurasian continent. Is that vague enough? Came back to campus at the start of their junior year with instructions from her family to not come back home at the end of the school year, to stay through the summer, through her senior year and beyond, if necessary. The girls across the hall were from Texas and Brazil. The Brazilian girl's family had given her the same instructions not to go home. In fact, just about all the chinese students, the ones who made it to campus that year, had the same or similar instructions. A lot of international students were well enough off that they could pay the full tuition. A lot of them had parents who worked for governments or some other institution in the know and the fear was getting real. The media was only just starting to cover this new disease in far off, exotic places, and talking about quarantining people who'd come on international flights from a hot area, but not much more.

Seeing classmates from all over with similar stories of seeing neighbors chewing on their doors, of the cartels working together to bring down some early cases in the streets, and of their stalwart father in a powerful government office job coming home with blood spatter, packing a bag and sending their daughter to school early. Even in the college bubble, it makes an impression.

She would call me and talk about it. What it was like stepping back on campus, where some of the international students were suddenly applying for visas for their families, or were spreading what they'd seen and heard in whispers to some of their domestic friends and asking if they and their families could stay with them until it blew over.

 **Did any say yes?**

Not many owned a large enough house or enough land to support that kind of request. A lot of them lived in apartments in cities, things like that. But some students had a larger house with fenced or gated yards, and when the fear started to set in, some of those students' families eventually said yes, so people who could make it to the US could have a place to stay. The fallible part of this plan was that none of them thought the US wouldn't fare as well as they hoped. But we were talking about maps.

 **No worries.**

Well, maps. She started working on a project with some classmates on mapping in epidemiology. It wasn't a new idea, by any means. John Snow[5] knew a thing or two about it. Figured out some basics pretty early on. But this group was working on a more user-friendly map. More interactive. They wanted more of the public to have access to this map. Perhaps not to read all that it contained, but at least the ability to add to it.

 **How does that work? How would it help?**

It would be a community contribution map. It was designed by a group of students, mind you, but this is the general idea. The ebola epidemic did make progress towards the real-time mapping of confirmed cases by physicians. But those data points were only added upon the confirmation of a doctor's say so. If any nurse or technician wanted to add a case to the map, they couldn't. Or, hey, a human with eyes and a familiarity of the symptoms, watching someone with a fever puking up their guts and bleeding out their eyes can put two and two together. They would have to find an overworked doctor to confirm a clear or, at the very least, strongly suspected case, and if a map like this is to work, time is of the essence.

 **[Brief pause. Linden watches through the screen as one of his sons, a strapping youth of around 16 or 17, gets home, soaked from walking in the rain. After waving at us, he gathers some pre-shortened logs and a hatchet sitting under the lean-to, which stands next to a stump used for chopping wood.]**

It makes sense. You don't want just anyone adding to the map. Especially in the pill-addicted West[6], especially in fearful times, you don't want people adding to the map when there aren't, in fact, any cases. Nothing hurts the fight against infections more than hypochondriacs crying wolf at every sneeze and monopolizing people's time. But the incubation period for ebola is anywhere from a couple of days to over twenty, and those conditions aren't too dissimilar from the Zombie Plague, which, in the early days, if it was contracted through a bite versus a skin graft, might develop in a few hours, or weeks.

 **[Linden's son has gotten into a rhythm, and is tearing through the logs, splitting them into kindling. He doesn't seem bothered by the slick conditions, or the worry of his grip slipping on the handle. Quick, decisive strokes crack into the gathering evening.]**

I was never so good with an axe. That was more my dad. And my sister, after Dad ... She's the one who taught Dean **[Gestures towards the muddy yard.]** and the other kids to be a lumberjack whenever she came to town. Imagine, it used to be that the "cool aunt" would bring candy and fake IDs when they visited. Then, everything changed, and the "cool aunt" became cool by enforcing manual labor.

If you want a community map, you want something that will give you a pretty accurate idea of the spread pattern, and you want to be able to screen out the distractions. That's where the layers come in. Only want to see the cases as confirmed by the doctors? Done. Want to see a layer from registered nurses, who are able to see more patients, speak to more family members, able to physically get eyes on more people? Create a layer where RNs can add data points for strongly suspected cases. Another one for LPNs, who see just as many people in a day. Hell, custodial staff in any building probably see more than just about anyone else during down hours, and you don't want their input? And another one for police departments, who can damn well tell the difference between a chomper and someone on LSD. No joke, there were people who tried to spread the theory that it was all just a new variety of LSD where people lost all ability to use door knobs and had a tendency to bite but, no big deal, they were just tripping out of their minds.

Here's where the beauty comes in. It gave the possibility for a layer for self-reported cases. Before, who did you call when you thought you were sick? Either your doctor, a hospital or the CDC, all of which were inundated during outbreaks of any kind, and hospitals had all of their usual cases to deal with; car crashes, heart attacks, asthma attacks, the whole nine yards. By going to the hospital, you risk yourself, the hospital staff, other patients and anyone else you run into on the streets. With a phone and an internet connection, you had the ability to self-report your symptoms and your location is added to the map. People can go door to door and confirm or dismiss cases in a more organized fashion, which also cuts down on the overall transit of people.

That layer is no doubt an overwhelming layer. But with the other layers overlaying it, it creates a sort of topographic image of the spread and the potential to extract directional implications. You can project where new flares might pop up and nip them in the bud. If it gets too overwhelming, you can click a button, turn it off and focus on what we know with more certainty.

It didn't have to stop there. You could see that waterways slowed them down, but also hid the infected. What if you added a layer of elevations and saw that Z spread faster downhill because, quite simply, it's harder for the dead to go downhill than to climb? You could add layers that included roads, gas stations, hospitals, churches, anywhere where people congregate or pass through, and project future flares and outbreaks.

 **What happened to this map? Did those students or their professors ever propose it for real use?**

They actually kept it relatively quiet. The school and its students were already labeled as uppity social justice warriors anytime they talked about institutionalized sexual assault. I guess their professors thought it was a worthy exercise, but they were busy; they had classes to teach, conferences to attend, papers to publish and students to advise. The government was still trying to keep everything quiet, so I'm not sure how receptive they would have been towards a map made of already dead cases, and made by a bunch of neurotic students.

Besides, the whole mapping concept was a small seminar, mostly talked about with friends during study breaks, on a weekend morning or over meals, then planned and developed over the course of my sister's junior spring semester. We'd talk on the phone to bounce ideas, and she and her friends decided to use their summer break before senior year to "prepare." A classmate from Japan had found this site where people were posting all kinds of information. Proper analysis and response theories based on legitimate data, mostly stolen through hacking, I believe, and believable anecdotes.

They decided it was as good a source as they were going to get, so they made a list of things to gather during the summer, and they'd pool their resources at the school come the start of next fall. The cool thing was, they'd decided to gather materials to fortify their campus, since it was about as far from bigger cities as it was going to get. The other colleges in the consortium were all situated in cities or towns, and one of them was just too small to support the numbers and materials they needed. A bunch of the international students, remember I told you a lot of them could afford the full tuition? Their families funded a lot of the materials, including their temporary storage at a nearby storage facility. Generators, solar panels, rebar, building materials, meds, tools, seeds, camping gear, even contraceptives.

 **Contraceptives?**

Yeah, some of the more conservative families wouldn't have liked it. They probably wouldn't have been told that was one of the places their money was going. Anyway, the word of mouth had spread some, and there was a whole recruitment process. No one used social media as effectively as millennials. They weren't the only ones preparing, even if most did think it was a joke. The famous college consortium is over here on the West Coast since it was filmed, but you've got the Five College Consortium back east, and a few places that held out for a while down south. The stronghold in North Dakota, from what I hear, was a force to be reckoned with. I don't think they were ever breached. Not once, in ten years, which is somewhat mind-boggling.

Students from coastal city campuses came inland, where you could predict conditions a little more and you wouldn't need to contend with the tides or unexpected vessels with unexpected people. Anyway, the students got the funding they needed to buy radio equipment to supplement what the radio club had. Set up a little radio station in the geology lounge and, since the professors didn't really take notice, were able to stock the lounge with all sorts of informational manuals. Even if they noticed, I'm not sure they cared enough to do much about it. They had to hold off on walling off the campus acreage, since the administration called the suggestion ludicrously unnecessary and labeled it campus "defacement." They stored all the materials in the storage lockers for later and told everyone who was planning on moving to campus when things went downhill to start getting in shape. Every college campus had workout rooms, so access to gyms was no issue.

 **Sounds like quite the collective.**

It was, considering many of the students themselves didn't take it seriously. I didn't, not really, and my sister would joke that if she ended up in a history book, it would be for prepper crackpots. She knew she was about as neurotic as they come. They had students planning to come from as far north as Vermont and Maine, since survival would come in numbers, and from farther east, from Ivies along the coast, and families from the local township. It's important to bear in mind there was no crush of people vying for places. This was still part crackpot exercise in paranoia and part youth project; an obsession that would fall out of fad soon enough.

 **What were some of the plans? How did they even tackle such a prospect?**

You'd need to ask them. I can tell you mainly what they brainstormed. They'd already decided the ground floors of any building wouldn't be inhabited in case of a breach, which meant two floors for any of the buildings built into a slope. They would store things like grain, building materials, things that didn't need supervision or particularly climate controlled environments. The next floor up was dedicated to storage of any equipment, and some smaller livestock. Yes, any livestock that could climb stairs, all lived a floor up in the buildings. That's a story for another time. Ask the project members about it, if any are willing. They're the ones who drew up the plans. All I know is secondhand, so you're better off tracking down the people who were there. The second floor, or third floor for buildings built into slopes, and up would house people. Solar panels would, ideally, be installed on the roofs next to the beehives. Components for a water purification and storage system were in storage, ready to be put together.

 **Were you ever planning, or did you have any intention, of going to one of the preparing strongholds? Especially knowing what you knew?**

No. We knew something was up, but we didn't know when things would start to turn for the worse. The Black Death, bubonic plague, ramped up over the course of a few years, and receded over another couple once the worst was over. With today's technology, our medical innovation, our military might, our interconnectedness, who knew when or if it would ever hit the fan? Who could possibly predict it would escalate to the human population being reduced to a tenth of what is was and a good two thirds of it shambling around? Whatever I had on my mind back then, a full on apocalypse didn't occur to me until after Yonkers when the government announced the retreat. I was living several states away with my roommate before the scandal broke in the news, but I knew I needed to make sure my parents had something figured out before I bugged out. Even my sister never stuck around to build her plans on campus.

 **She didn't?**

No. When she graduated, she left behind a cache of supplies and materials, and a wealth of information in the form of manuals, how-to books and contact information for nearby resources. She'd even pre-bought a bunch of beehives to support the agricultural bit and worked it out with the guy to take care of them until future students came by to pick them up. She felt she'd laid the groundwork for her school's survival, and now there were bigger fish to fry. I think she was too ADHD to stay. She was pretty good at things she did or tried, but terrible at sticking around long enough to gain any sort of mastery. The spark she'd lit in high school was on full throttle by now, and she was in her idealistic phase of changing the world with some new project.

She had plans for joining the military to help disseminate intelligence. Tracking ghouls when they don't have human heat signatures, they aren't tied to any kind of landmarks, and they keep moving at night without flashlights or any way to keep tracking them. That was her challenge, and she was determined to be a part of the solution. Realistically, I think she knew her big weakness was sticking to things, and she was looking for structure. That's why she told our parents about her plans for joining the military during her senior year. Went over like lead balloon.

 **What about you? What were your plans?**

Our conversations over her junior year led me to share some of what I knew with my girlfriend, which got her interested. The maps the students produced were pretty damning, both for this new disease and for whatever junk was in this miracle Phalanx vaccine. My girlfriend spent that summer contacting people, interviewing them either in person or by internet calls. By that point, I had reengaged with the world, I'd been with my girlfriend for a little while, I'd heard enough stories from my sister's classmates and done enough contract work for people with 'eyes only' under-the-table projects that I realized I had my own use. I was needed to help with the effort through programming. The internet and all of its users were about to have a huge downgrade in terms of use and actors inputting information, and I was going to be needed. I didn't know whether it would be building a new zombie-tracking system from the ground up or redesigning administrative code and I didn't care. I would be one of the few people to hit the ground running when everything went bust.

And I did. It was like graduating high school as one of the kids who would go to college in times of uncertainty with the one certainty that, if you made it through, you could make it eventually. Like graduating college and getting a job in my field, while my friends donned aprons. When the story broke, I was ready. When the government needed work done, I set up shop back at my parent's house on the West Coast and worked remotely on updating systems to better handle the fallout. Turns out I made myself valuable enough to have a couple of Army Rangers assigned to this house when an outbreak got my parents and a couple chickens. When they heard that my parents were dead and the security of the house was compromised, they realized they'd be hardpressed to find someone this side of the Cascades with both my skillset and my up-to-date knowledge of where everything stood. When the government announced a retreat to the Rockies, I was already west of there, west of the the Monitor and Bitterroot Ranges, west of the Cascades.

The US got our house in order in Hawaii and Alaska - which wasn't quite so hard, given that it was an island chain and Alaska is, well, Alaska. We got our ducks in a row in western Washington, Oregon and California, and had somewhat cleared the main safe zones in Idaho, Utah and Nevada. The LA Sweeps were still in progress, but nearing completion when the US hosted the Honolulu Conference and soon after declared the offensive strategy.

By that point, outbreaks had taken my parents, and I was rattling around in their big house with the dogs, cats and chickens. Didn't even have the Ranger Ricks to keep me company, since the town as considered safe, and my fences were intact. My girlfriend was able to talk to the Department of Housing for the resettlement program and got billeted with me. We had a retired couple, the Martins, for a while at first. We got another family, the Chowdhurys, and a few solitary survivors billeted at my place. It was nice, having people in the house again. They were happy to be there, even if the rooms were crammed with people. We had a wood stove and some stored wood that my dad had stocked up and never used. Fruit trees, too. It was idyllic, especially for a suburban house near the edge of the city. Fences, a stream, trees, chickens.

We even got a generator, since my work qualified as necessary for the war effort, and Mr. Chowdhury was ex-army. He re-upped, even though it had been about fifteen years since he'd taken his leave. He was an engineer in his civilian life. I don't know what his old army mos[7] was, I don't remember, a desk clerk or something, during an era when they were just graduating from floppies[8] to discs and flash drives, and they were figuring out that dial-up sucked. In any case, they took him back as an engineer, and we'd stay up at night, lights on. He'd be pouring over plans spread out over the table, and I'd be sitting at my keyboard.

 **[Linden's son, Dean, trudges up to the porch, having stacked the freshly split wood under the lean-too to dry. He is soaked, but takes the time to gather the more thoroughly dried wood stacked on the porch for the woodstove inside. Linden's eyes follow his son inside, then flick back to the yard, which has grown impressive puddles in the darkening garden. The smell of a hot stew wafts to the porch from the house.]**

My mom's first husband served in Vietnam. She used to have this nickname for 'Nam vets. She called them the Drafted and Shafted, since most of them didn't have a choice in going and they had the worst conditions and survived them only to finish their service, head home and have protesters call them killers and murderers. They'd gone through hell and back for this shit? She opposed that war, but the one thing my mom was alright with was the equalizing effect of the draft. Save for some of the wealthier kids in her class, mostly with lawyers for parents who got their kids out as conscientious objectors or a religious orthodoxy classification, every male in her age group went, regardless of race or socioeconomic standing. Everyone, save for what I mentioned earlier. She'd comment that the one thing that they, meaning the government, did right was that if anyone was going to go to war, it should be every demographic in society. The draft did a better job in ensuring a more accurate cross-section of the US population at the time. That war became so unpopular and costly in so many ways that the US gave up and left, though not in so many words. The military changed to an all volunteer service.

I won't go into the nitpicking of details of the percentages of military service members and their demographics, classes and other boxes before the Z Plague. My point is, there was this huge discussion going on about gender, class and white privilege. Whether women should register for selective service. White privilege was a big one, and the political left and right were tearing into each other about whether or not it exists, and whether it would matter, and whether anyone was to blame. **[Laughter. More bitter than not.]** I certainly had my struggles before the war. Everyone did. But that's the American Dream and its inherent struggle. We are hypothetically created equal, but no one is actually equal. It's only through concentrated effort that we can ever come close to that goal.

Anyone who doesn't believe that inequalities exist is living in their anus and in dire need of an enema. Take that asshole **[name withheld for legal reasons]** , a Vietnam draft dodger, by the way, who spent his days before the plague on the radio railing against people he didn't like and ranting about how white privilege didn't exist, how it still doesn't, and how he's earned everything he has fairly. He's still alive. Still yammering on about how he managed to survive the Zombie Plague. It's like he thinks he's the lone survivor who is now charged with the task of telling everyone else about what cowards they were during the war. He spent Vietnam cowering, and the years following berating everyone else. He spent the plague huddled in Cuba, a place he railed against for years for being an enemy of the US. Took one of the first rafts going the other way. Guess where he has his bank accounts today? Cuba. All while he flaps his lips about what traitors people are for continuing to live in the Stone Age by bartering, he tries to buy up housing and land before any survivors can come along and reclaim what was theirs. Well …

 **[Linden's wife subtly steps out onto the porch bearing a local microbrew and appetizers of fried mushrooms his son, Dean, has collected on his way home. Always bearing an aura of collected dignity, Kelli Tate departs to check on dinner's progress.]**

Hey, you won't be able to publish this for a bit, right? You can keep this under your hat until we make our move?

 **Uh yeah, sure. What is it?**

Well, it will take a while yet for us to work towards preparing a proper case against Breckinridge Scott to drag him back to the US to stand trial. That's assuming we ever manage it. But Kelli's got a contact who's just become the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's assured us, between you and me, that nabbing that bastard is one of his top priorities. Turns out **[name withheld for legal reasons]** and Breckinridge Scott are pretty good friends, and he's been one of Scott's main pundits. Most of his broadcasts are designed to distract people from remembering one of the main reasons the masses were caught so off guard. **[Name withheld for legal reasons]** has spent every spare moment reminding people of the US's implementation of the Redecker plan, and not a single second on the Phalanx vaccine fraud that he himself helped to invest in. He cashed in on that golden goose and has only bothered to look back because karma has started raining on his parade. Now the tides have turned, he's doing everything he can to discredit the administration's decision to leave people behind and pull troops back. **[Sighs. Sips on his beer.]**

It was like the recession all over again. Wealthy and, let's be honest, white, men contrived to do their banking, lining their pockets with other people's money. It eventually went wrong and plunged the economy into chaos and who has to pay for it? The general public, and those people who'd gotten us into the mess to begin with got an end-of-year bonus in the millions. Already depressed communities were hit hardest, and these people have the gall to claim they didn't work hard enough, or that they're freeloading criminals.

Then, just a few years later, there's a real, tangible problem on the horizon. Here are these men with entire portions of the world's wealth and resources at their fingertips. They can, just the handful of these people, change the whole face of our survival by galvanizing governments, including the most powerful one with the most sophisticated, powerful military the world has ever seen, into action. They can arrange for prisons, schools, you name it, to be converted into sanctuaries, for hospitals to be fully prepared, for health professionals to have the information they need. Hey, if they're still too caught up with sleeping on beds of fresh greenbacks, they can make money off of pre-assembled bug out bags for city dwellers who don't know what to pack for a trek north.

What do these wealthy white men do? What they've always done. **[Name withheld for legal reasons]** wants to bellyache about the Redecker plan when everyone knows he spent the decade in a lawn chair sipping sweet drinks? He wants to call my wife a bitch and a skank and every name under our canopy of pollution? Fine, he can call her names. I've never been the possessive or angry type. She's a big girl who can, and has done, hold her own.

Speaking of white privilege, my white American millennial male status helped me along certain paths in life. It gave me the privilege to an education, and to be the one who helped to cut his money parade short the first time. Gave me the privilege to make it through this mess. And it's giving me the privilege to help bring the him to justice.

I know I'm biased in a whole lot of ways. I know I grew up in a hippy left-leaning state with a lot of idealism, and I know I gave my then-girlfriend the starting point to blow the whole scandal. He's recently started attacking people she's associated with on air. He claimed that Kelli Tate's husband, that's me, spent the war cowering behind a computer. He's not wrong. I spent the war in the only house for blocks with a generator, staring at a screen. But he's also completely missed the point. I spent a decade remotely accessing the last of the operating servers, which wasn't many, scrounging fragments of largely moot data. There isn't much left of our server farms around the world, but the ones that stayed intact had gold.

 **[He points at our empty plates, where the mushroom appetizers no longer sit.]**

They call it mushroom hunting, which is funny, since it's hardly hunting. You can just stumble around and pick them. But then again, hunting spineless mold like **[name withheld for legal reasons]** is hardly hunting. **[Brightens.]**

Did I mention my roommate from before the war, my friend from college, did I mention he's an accountant? He's with the IRS, now. He's got a bone or two to pick with a few people, himself and Sinclair's got his hands full with Scott and everything else on his plate. Sinclair shouldn't have to deal with piggybacking scum like **[name withheld for legal reasons]**. I've got this one.

* * *

[1] The Recession of 2008, also called the Great Recession, was a major worldwide economic downturn caused by the Financial Crisis of 2008. It was by far the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

[2] GIS: Geographical Information System. Used to arrange, layer and interpret geospatial data.

[3] Chair Force: Nickname for the US Air Force to make fun of the branch's relatively high education levels and desk positions.

[4] Pre-war colleges and universities used various algorithms for enrollment. Many schools preferred to admit students who were "well-rounded" and had a level of proficiency in various areas, including academic excellence, music, sports, community service and high scores on standardized tests.

[5] Dr. John Snow, considered to be the father of epidemiology, mapped the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London, England, which led to the correlation between cholera cases and water pumps.

[6] While prescription medication is notoriously rare and difficult to come by today, prewar US pharmaceuticals were quite common. It was a running joke that Americans popped pills in the morning and bullets in the afternoon.

[7] MOS: Military Occupational Specialty code, is a code used in the United States Army and United States Marines to identify a specific job.

[8] Floppies: A _floppy disk_ , also called a _floppy_ , diskette or just _disk_ , is a type of _disk_ storage composed of a _disk_ of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. Millennials were the last generation of students who had regular use or proficiency with the storage medium before their use was superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, among others.


	3. Chapter 3 - Tamboli, Part 1

**Consortium, Massachusetts**

 **[To get to the campus, visitors ordinarily park outside the double layered 12 foot wrought iron fences set into a brick base wall. Due to recent undocumented vessels landing in Boston, offloading passengers without infection clearance, the campus has reverted to wartime protocol. I drive through the external iron perimeter and into a buffer zone, which has been planted with easy, low-attention crops postwar, where I park. On foot, I walk through another set of gates set into thick cob walls that snake for miles around the campus's many acres, much of them wooded. Cob, made from stones, mud, sand, straw and water, dries to form a solid monolith. Built by hand with cemented boulders at its base and short eaves atop, this wall averages twelve feet tall, including the narrow roofing, and more than two feet thick in some places. The second buffer zone is planted with mostly grains and other staple crops. I see many sweet potato plants. This is nothing compared to the third wall, several meters off. Also made of cob, and clearly built with attention to detail, it is fifteen feet tall and as much as a meter thick for most of it. It is a work of art. It has sturdy railing made from scavenged materials, is topped with a platform and roof that serves as vantagepoint from which one can stand well over the heads of ghouls and use sharpened rebar spears to dispatch them. Said rebar spears are hung on hooks spaced every fifteen feet or so, to ensure weapons are always on hand.**

 **Timeless architecture looms ahead as I enter into the third buffer zone, which turns out to be a wide path of packed dirt. The fourth fence is the school's original wrought iron fence, only a meter tall and meant more for style than any semblance of security. It frames the campus. The front gates, once meant for welcoming newcomers to an oasis for women's learning, symbolized safehaven and today remain as a vestige of free and open spaces, where free thinkers were once encouraged to roam without a care.**

 **The pounding of hooves builds behind me and I turn to find a magnificently kept horse barreling towards me. Astride with ease is my host, Asha Tamboli. She is a formidable woman and her happy disposition and deft movements enhance her long and lithe form. In her late thirties or early forties and now a US citizen, her smile doesn't quite cover for an air of exhaustion she seems to carry, though her posture in the saddle is impeccable.]**

You made it. Our contact sentry radioed that you parked a few minutes ago. I thought you'd got lost. I'm Asha Tamboli, we spoke on the phone.

 **Thank you for having me. I was just admiring what you built here. [Asha flashes a smile and dismounts, handing the reigns to a waiting replacement who mounts and trots off, continuing the round.]**

You haven't been inside yet. Come on. And, full disclosure, I'm a talker, so if you have any questions, feel free to interrupt or take us in a different direction. You wanted to talk about the school's story, right?

 **Both that, and the people who planned it, built it and lived in it. I'm also looking to speak to a couple of people. Cedar Barrett, if you know where she is, and Henry Marsden and Arlene Cross, if you know who they are.**

Henry Marsden, Arlene Cross. Don't know them, sorry. You're welcome to see our visitor log in case they visited here, though. As for Cedar, I haven't seen her since she visited last year. In case no one's told you, she's a hard one to corner. Sorry I can't help you there, but if she comes by, I'll let her know you're looking for her. She's generally pretty receptive to people. I'll start off with the tour, shall I? I actually worked as a student tour guide here, back before the war, so it'll be like old times.

You saw the outermost gate, the iron on brick, on your way in. We call it Perimeter 1, or just One, since it served as our first contact with the outside world. It was about the first thing we built. The brick was quick to lay and cementing the iron inserts was straight forward. Once they dried, we could breathe a tad easier. A few years later, we were able to source enough iron fencing, brick and mortar that we added a second layer to the fence. That way, if they grabbed you, you'd hit the inner fence and they couldn't reach their face to you. The space just inside was Buffer 1. The outer cob wall is called Perimeter 2, or Two, followed by Buffer or Buff 2. We desperately needed to maintain One's integrity, so we had details along Buffer 1 with rebar dispatching any Zack that came up to the fence. If anything went wrong, you would dash to Two, which had hand holds built into it, I'm not sure if you saw them. We didn't want them to be obvious from the outside. Anyway, if something did go wrong at One, and you were cut off from Two's gates, you'd be able to climb the handholds. Zack can't climb, so that's one blessing.

Perimeters 2 and 3 took an entire season to build after our first winter - what year was it? It was the year or two after the Great Panic and I think we were hearing about the LA Sweeps and the Honolulu Conference that year, which would have been about four years before the Road to New York got under way.

 **Were you expecting the army to make it here? Was that something you hoped for?**

Why, do we seem like those secessionist dickheads who can't get over the reality that there were no good options? ... I'm sorry, I escalated that quickly. Some of them are bitter about that because they can't let go of their past, which is always hard. I get that, I really do. Some of them have grown happy ruling their own little kingdoms and can't let go of their present. Come on.

I mean, no one is saying the Redecker Plan was moral or ethical. You could sit in an armchair with a pipe and some whisky in a room lined with academic volumes and pontificate on how, given the circumstances, ethics and morality were definitely on the army's side. But not even the army would agree with you there. It was a terrible option in a series of non-options. It was the only viable plan that would keep any form of infrastructure intact enough to plan a future for hominids.

They say American civilians survived fairly well compared to other civilian populations. Millions of firearms and ammunition squirreled away in every nook and cranny, individuality and an identity entrenched in the idea of frontiers and glorious superiority. A lot of it is true, but that American culture has a longer lasting negative impact. My parents sent me and my sister here, saying they'd follow us. We all knew that wasn't really going to happen. But their self sacrifice was expected. Immigrant parents to any country frequently sacrifice their personal wealth, status, dreams and freedoms for their children's opportunities. The idea of setting aside your wants for the greater purpose. It's a concept that secessionists still don't have for the whole of humanity, and that's why governments around the world are still struggling with trying to reintegrate surviving groups who can't comprehend that change is cyclical.

Even though a lot of us, including myself, weren't Americans, we were happy to hear that the US government was still intact, because it meant an eventual 'liberation' of sorts. But we weren't holding our breath. The military had to pull back for a reason, so we weren't expecting any help within our lifetimes, and our life expectancy had drastically shortened. We planned accordingly. As for their return, we expected that it would eventually happen, and the world is always changing. If we couldn't learn to adapt to another change, then we hadn't learned our lesson on survival in the first place.

We're standing in Buffer 3, which you'll notice, is narrower and unplanted. We left it that way so we could exercise the horses somewhere that wasn't Upper Lake's trail. We have two lakes, ponds really, Upper and Lower. During the war we started to run our horses on Buffer 3, which gives them a good workout, depending on how many rounds we give them, serves to keep our sentries on Three sharper, which in turn keeps our perimeters more secure and **[leans in slightly]** spreads the manure around a little more.

This iron fence and the main gate are from the original campus. We kept it to trip up any Zack that somehow made it that far. We figured we needed a clear line of sight to Perimeter 3 from the main campus, and if Zack, or anyone else, really did get that far, we were probably screwed, anyway.

You'll notice the campus walkways don't really make sense. They aren't supposed to. The architect who designed the campus wanted America's women scholars to exercise wandering feet as well as wandering minds, so the paths kind of crisscross and swerve around. Drove some of the students crazy back in the day. During the war, it drove some of us crazy because it made planning crops and calculating yields that much more labor intensive. It was a good thing the founders planned for The Orchards.

 **The Orchards?**

The Orchards. It was one of the country's preeminent 18-hole golf courses. Don't ask me anything more about it, I know nothing of the sport. The point is, the founders left us with a ton of information and optional plans. We ended up planting a series of orchards, including some longer term nut trees and other crops. The golf carts really saved our necks hauling planting materials around campus, especially when we went out and got a bunch more from the country club. We mainly used the school's horses, and some that we picked up from the other schools and nearby stables. Once we got more established, we were able to use the horses instead of cars and golf carts, since we had enough feed and grazing area, and we had to conserve our fuel. Started out with so many horses, they wouldn't all fit in the stables. We had to use the field house.

 **Can you tell me more about how this place started? Tell me about these founders?**

Of course! The founders. Well, we mostly just call a somewhat fluid group of people the founders. Technically, some count me as one of the founders, although I was only a first year when the Great Panic started, and I didn't take a leadership role until we were more established. I'm originally from Pakistan. Some of the older girls who had graduated from the same grammar school as me had come here, too, and mentioned at a student club that there was a group of upperclass students who were drawing plans to fortify the school. The US was still largely in denial, like most governments, but fear was slowly trickling in.

When I told my parents about the students who were quietly, and mostly in jest, planning a project together to fortify the school, they bought my younger sister a ticket, even though she was three years younger than me, and not college age, yet. They told me in no uncertain terms that I was to seek out these girls and make friends with them. My sister was to come to school with me while our parents figured something out for themselves. If the school was crunched for space, she would sleep in my bed.

 **[Asha hands me a folded paper from her pocket. It is a flier, including a generalized map of the campus before and the campus as it stands today beneath it. The flip side has general history notes and points of interest, including some of the original school's founding information.]**

When I arrived for my second year, it was July - way before classes would ever start. The Phalanx scandal had broken late the previous summer, and the Panic had been escalating since winter ended. Instead of dorm room decorations, my suitcases were filled with items that had I had gathered over the summer with my family. Before I left campus the previous semester, I had followed my parent's orders. The true founders, the ones who worked on the project, are the ones who sent me a list of things to bring. Things that would become commodities that they didn't have time to focus on, or things that would be inevitably necessary. Medicines, female hygiene products, many sewing kits, nail clippers, hand mirrors, toothbrushes. I got together with another returning student and we found a bunch of looms so we could make clothing.

We arrived at the airport which was a relatively short drive to campus. A school van was waiting for several of us in the chaos. One girl had brought her two younger brothers and her older brother, and another had brought her grandmother. The van was driven by a guy from one of the other colleges, but he took everyone, no questions asked. It was dark when we got there. I was exhausted, and looking forward to getting to my dorm room. Instead, we were taken to the athletic field house, where they'd set up about a hundred cots and blankets. Our driver apologized and explained that this was new protocol. We would be able to get a good night's rest and in the morning, we'd shower in the athletic center's locker rooms. It wasn't comfortable, but we were tired, and there was a sense of relief at having made it. I never noticed the girl who stood guard on the balcony above us. Later, when I took up intake shifts, I found out it was to take care of any possible infection.

The next morning, some of the Founders greeted the newcomers. Cedar Barrett, I'm still sorry I can't help you more in finding her, had graduated the previous year and hopped on. The last anyone had heard, she had these grand plans of joining the military. Something about tracking herds. **[Shakes her head.]** I don't know where she got her energy. Or her balls. Sorry.

 **Not at all.**

Now, it was a new core group. Marana Northrop, Baozhai Chen, Maxine Bent and geography Professor Mike Gaines were the remaining members of the original project. Fatima Gibson was another one, but she didn't make it to campus until later. Justin Liu, our driver from the night before, was a student from UMass. Trina Wilson was from the other womens' college, and Lucas Foster and Cyra Welch were from Amherst and Hampshire, respectively. They weren't all there that morning, I was just listing them, in case you didn't see their names on that flier there.

Anyway, it was just Maxine and Justin that morning. About forty people or so had come in the night before, and they brought everyone a great breakfast and gave us the rundown. We were going to fill out a medical form if we were new, and an update sheet if we were a returning student. I was returning so I only filled out an update sheet. Mostly about any contact with Zack. Then, they carefully explained that they needed to check everyone for infection.

By that point, anyone paying attention knew Israel was using dogs to sniff out infections, but they didn't have any dogs, yet. That meant the showers. They told us that if they found a bite mark or a suspicious injury, we would not be kicked out. Instead, we would be given a choice. Since it was a known death sentence, they were willing to put you out of your misery in any way you chose, barring drug overdose since they were stockpiling those, but you were welcome to a bullet if you wanted that. If you didn't want that, you could spend your last days, assuming you had that long, helping out with fortifications and eating good meals under supervision. Once you turned, they'd put you down. It was all very gently explained. They knew both people and Zack would soon be clawing to get in, and they wanted to set a positive precedent, especially since most of the people coming this early had heard of the project by word of mouth. Friends of friends.

 **[Chickens and goats graze in penned areas to ensure they don't damage crops. Dogs roam the campus, making rounds. Now that the war is over, outdoor structures have been built for livestock and storage. The buildings have been reclaimed as classrooms, dormitories, offices and dining rooms. The college has re-opened its doors, maintaining its status as the longest surviving place of higher learning for women in the US. It also makes it the first prewar institution east of the Rockies to receive students after VA Day, starting class a mere four months after VA Day was declared. The incoming class will be the the ninth class since the school reopened its gates.]**

I would have thought people would freak out over the inspections. Everyone was scared, but it was all logical and they had explained it with so much compassion that it actually went over really well. We were also working on a full night's sleep and full stomachs, which helped. Luckily, a couple of the new arrivals were, in fact, dog trainers and experienced owners of finicky breeds, so as soon as we could get some dogs they'd have their main job.

Once we left the field house, we were assigned housing. It was cramped. Since the school, and the US, were officially in session, and the Founders didn't know how many students wanted, or could, show up that year, they crammed as many people to a room as possible. The school administration was crumbling as more of the staff had family members stopped answering their calls, and a lot of them were going to look for them, or packing their cars and heading north to join family members they knew were going that way. It wasn't that they didn't think we could do it, it was more that our idea seemed ridiculous, kind of cliche. It was. Every youthful generation is berated by older ones for being lazy, horny, stupid, all that stuff. We, along with other campuses and churches and groups that were starting to kick into gear, had this idea that we would maybe go hungry a couple of days, but ultimately prevail against the undead, come of age and then get on with our lives.

We managed to get into Auxiliary Services to get the door keys to all the the dorm and campus doors, and collect all of the master keys. We needed to organize all of the keys and have a system. A lot of the doors were primarily swipe access, which wasn't sustainable. That was my main job. The school year hadn't started, yet, so I was able to monopolize all of the keys. With input from Marana, I was able to work out this system wherein there was a hierarchy of keys and master keys. There was a whole system laid out about keys, access and the philosophy behind it.

It might seem nitpicky, but those were plans from Marana and the other Founders themselves. It was an open door policy for the most part, anyway. Buildings and rooms with valuables, like our weapons caches, medicines, food, feed, records, were all kept under lock and key. But personal rooms were all unlocked. You could lock your door from the inside at night, but when people were out and about, everything was unlocked. We needed a culture of trust. It's not like money or jewelry were valuable for anything other than sentiment, anyway. And what if you carried your key somewhere and died? It's not like we could just replace them, so we got cozy.

Turns out Marana was the de facto leader because even though several of the professors were staying with their families, the professors tended to be academics who knew very little about the workings of the campus, and many of the administrative staff had booked it. A lot of the staff and faculty really cared. Custodial staff would drop off their keys to me if they could, and wish us luck. It turns out later that they all had some idea of the Founders' plans, because Marana, Maxine, Cedar and Baozhai had already gone down the list of the staff and had them write instructions on how everything in the school functioned. They truly left no stone unturned. They had everything collected in the Geo Lounge. The Geo Lounge was the lounge for the Geology, Geography and Environmental Science departments. Even before the first Zack moaned it's first, that geo lounge had machetes, rock hammers, maps, camping stoves extra socks and cactuses piled everywhere. That was where Cedar left the Bible.

 **Bible?**

A series of bibles, or encyclopedias, really. Cedar Barrett, as it turned out, was fastidious as fuck when it came to documentation. Pardon the language, but it's true. She had the Founders' original seminar project printed out; all of their maps, research, sources, some of them translated from Japanese by a friend. Then, she had several copies of this booklet that was, like, a table of contents for the series of collected resources. It was like a cheat sheet on how to use all of these resources. One of the binders was lists of businesses, farms, just a textual map of resources within a twenty mile radius, with a note from Cedar in the margins reminding us that if the pandemic gets as bad as projected, (and we were advised to reference Maxine's maps and ideas on the subject), then we'd do best to avoid exceeding that distance in foraging for materials or supplies in case a horde come by that we couldn't handle. The Founders had the general ideas that everyone brainstormed. They'd drawn up some notes, but overall it was Cedar, with Maxine's help, who was obsessive enough to work out the details and organize them. Apparently, people only discovered that anyone had written everything out when they found that Cedar and Maxine had spent graduation night lugging their compiled library from their dorm to that lounge.

The Bible even had information on places she'd already contacted. If we were planning on agricultural endeavours, and she included a handwritten notation that we should, then we would need a reliable source of pollination. Baozhai's dad, Mr. Chen, was well and truly loaded, so he funded a lot of the Founder's purchases. Other student families pitched in, but Mr. Chen takes the cake. From what I hear, he had family money, loads of it himself and had one child to spend it all on before the world turned over. Anyway, she'd used this guy's money to pre-buy several beehives, associated tools, and instructions. Even advised us to give the guy a bonus payment in the form of goods upon pickup, in case that incentivized him to move to the campus and bring his beehives, tools, knowledge and ability to pass on that knowledge. She'd left a library of resources. She'd used that guy's money on great stuff. Books on carpentry, solar panel installation, on generators, car maintenance, foraging, canning, water sanitation. There weren't many books on cob construction, so she did online research; compiled and printed off booklets on that. She gave us our starting place.

This was a little before Yonkers. We didn't know about the Redecker plan, yet. But even though we didn't know the army would leave us behind, we knew that winning one big battle wouldn't solve our problems. Our first priority was going to be erecting Perimeter Zero, which was really just a chainlink fence. Cedar had pre-bought a crap-ton of chain link fencing, and we were to put that up until we could build something better. She'd drawn out different configurations of campus borders, based on how much time we estimated we had, and how much labor we had available, with later extensions planned should we choose a smaller, safer initial layout.

We had about four hundred people at that point, in a school whose dorms had housed the vast majority of it's normal student body of around 2200. Even during the war, we never reached max capacity, even while having the first couple floors of every building uninhabited. The school had issued an announcement that they would not be holding orientation, classes or anything for the foreseeable future, and that they were waiting to hear from authorities on whether it would be safe to officially begin the semester. Once that announcement was made, we got more and more people, mostly students from the five college consortium whose families were hoping everything would turn around, and the students were just waiting for classes to start. We had the dogs to check for the infected by then, and we gave the same deal to anyone who wanted a safe place to die. We knew we were playing with fire, but we needed the labor. Since everyone was working, everyone was carrying tools, so everyone was sufficiently armed against Zack.

Because of the number of people willing and eager to work, we picked one of the more ambitious plans drawn up in the Bible. It would give us several square miles. We'd build the brick base, and install the iron fencing, all along Morgan as it turned into Pleasant, head up Amherst, then west along West Street. Then, we'd break off from the road and encompass the Orchards, which would be labor intensive with uneven terrain and inexperienced builders. Once we got around the Orchards, we'd join with Woodbridge Street and head south until we met Morgan Street again. It was potential suicide. The smart plan would be to build the eastern wall along Cold Hill Road instead of Amherst, but Marana was determined. She also wasn't stupid, it turned out.

Marana had sent Justin with some of his buddies on a mission to some construction sites and farms. They came back with a backhoe, two tractors, a couple of bulldozers and a mind-boggling amount of gas. Did you know they'd been stock-piling gas for a while at that point? And the school had it's own little gas reserve for when their athletic teams went on trips, so that had been topped up. Marana's plan was also to monopolize on things the fence would block in, including pre existing greenhouses, fertilizer, et cetera from neighboring farms. It was ambitious, and I was panicking until I heard we weren't going to be doing it all by hand. With some saws, the bulldozers and backhoe, we wouldn't need to worry about clearing a swath around the Orchards, and on some of the house's front lawns to widen the streets and allow for buffer zones. Some of the families even welcomed it, because it meant their yard was gone, but their house was within the area where we planned on building the innermost borders. The houses across the street were left out, but the families were okay with that, too, because they were either long gone, living on campus, or moaning for lunch.

 **[Students weave around us as they pass between classes. While most students are of traditional college age, there is a notable population of older and younger than traditionally aged students. There is excited discussion about a party this coming evening. It will be hosted at a nearby co-educational campus, opening its doors for the first time since the war.]**

Marana was a taskmaster, and smart, but we still cut it close. Even with the acquired construction machines, the brick, the cement and one guy who was a real foreman. Even with, after another two weeks, around seven hundred people, all furiously working to create a haven from Zack. We cut it close. We still had television and internet streams, so as we neared completion of Perimeter One, we watched the Battle of Yonkers during our water breaks. We'd think we were spent, go put up our feet to watch the battle progress and be scalded into a furious new work pace. We were panicking. Marana looked stricken. She wasn't working on bulldozing the trees, collecting the wood, smoothing the ground, preparing the mortar, laying the brick or installing the wrought iron fences. But no one wanted to trade places with her. I'm sure she relied quite heavily on Professors Gaines and Wells, and Baozhai, Courtney and Justin, who advised her a great deal. But she had to plan ahead.

The news was brutal. We tried to watch reruns of shows that some stations were broadcasting for - hell, who knows why? We tried to unwind to them is what I'm saying. There was this reality television island show for a bit early on. We started watching that to get ideas on how they were setting up. Then, they imploded, live.

The one part of the news she sort of trusted was the weather. The meteorologists were the only people who were still willing and able to deliver sound estimates and predictions based on fact. The cumulative incidents, the seasonal wild forest fires that went unchecked and every "minor" incident that released a little more pollution all built up. Then Yonkers happened. Both American continents were clogged with everything that had been happening, and Yonkers was a little too close to home for comfort. The shit hitting the fan was always just a prewar expression to describe the smell affecting everywhere. It reached whole new levels of meaning that summer.

Marana had gone several steps more and expanded Cedar's plan even further, including some of the school's buildings that would be more difficult to fence in, but damn it she was going to preserve the school's integrity, and no one would argue with her, remaining professors and faculty included. Cedar's plan had accounted for most of the school's original acreage. Marana wanted it all.

At some point, she developed a sixth sense and took to carrying a pistol on her hip, somehow knowing when one of the infected workers was about to turn. She would appear just as someone was beginning to drag their last. She had a list of the infected, you see. She would put a casual hand on their shoulder, invite them for some iced tea and take them around the building, towards some picnic tables. A couple minutes later, having delivered a final gift of a cool drink and a friendly smile, we'd all hear the shot. Then Marana would head back to work. Cataloging supplies, creating more permanent housing assignments, rationing food.

 **Couldn't she have delegated some of those tasks?**

No. Every able body needed to be building and reinforcing that fence. Besides, too young and inexperienced, and they'd screw something up. Anyone too old or frail would be sent with one or two strong guys to collect hay.

 **Hay?**

Yes. And sand, for Perimeter Two.

 **She was planning on building Perimeter Two that same year? In a couple of weeks?**

No, she was more pragmatic than that. We needed to collect as much sand, straw and dirt as possible. Luckily, terraforming the areas around One helped with collecting a lot of easy boulders, dirt, and firewood for later, as it happens. It also evened out and packed the ground, making for a more stable foundation.

She had done the math. Winter was going to come early, and it was going to hit hard. Who knew what spring would bring? She was going to have the dirt already piled into neat piles all along the perimeter, ready to be worked and built into Perimeter 2 by the time the snow fell. She needed to send the more frail on food runs, too. And anyone who knew how to handle horses, anyone on the equestrian team, needed to go collect horses from nearby stables. There were a thousand tasks to do. We'd have to see which would reach campus first, ghouls or snow.

 **Tell me about what happened, then. How did the first winter go?**

 **[We have continued to walk the campus, seeing the now fruitful Orchard orchards, the lakes, stables and are now overlooking a few of the many fields.]**

We finished Perimeter One in time, a day and a half after Yonkers. We had worked to exhaustion and waited for everything to dry, hoping the fence would keep them out. Marana had other plans. She send a couple of her lieutenants under heavy guard to strategic junctions with instructions to strand cars in a pile up at the junctions. She was still open to taking people in, but she wasn't going to risk our location on a flood of the undead as they ploughed their way north. It was an extremely risky move, sending the teams that far south.

The moment One looked like it'd be finished in a half day, she sent them south towards Springfield so they could disrupt bridges and routes leading to campus. Campus was strategically placed, compared to the rest of the five colleges, and compared to coastal, city campuses. It sat with a river to the west, a small mountain set protected it to the north. A sparsely populated zone for miles to the east. The problem lay south. The air base a little south of campus was a plus, in case the military did indeed try to evacuate or supply civilians, we would be a prime choice. Further, they'd left an army custodial team there to maintain the airfield. They made it clear to us that we were on our own but, nonetheless, it gave us a sense that were weren't entirely alone. But the problem remained in its direct connections south, which were already highly trafficked, though the tide was ebbing. We needed to loosen our ties with Chicopee, Springfield, Hartford and New York.

That wasn't all. Just as we were finishing up the fence and road-blocking teams had been dispatched, Marana gathered more people and sent them on some final supply runs for food and medicine. The pharmacies and hospitals had already been picked over for a lot of things like aspirin, but things like insulin, codine and lidocaine aren't usually the first things people grabl. We cleaned everything out and added it to the pharmacy Mr. Chen had basically bought for us.

You might be about to ask whether it was a little late to do food runs for around seven hundred people? Yes, but there was a method to her madness. People had forgotten about fast food stored in bulk. The fatty, greasy, high calorie, quickly made food. We had spent weeks, months if I know Marana, and who knows what provisions Cedar had tucked away, hoarding dried beans, rice and other staples. Now, she was looking for quick calorie food. No one had raided the fast food freezers yet, so from a mere handful of stores and the local middle and high schools, we were able to grab entire banqueting feasts. The school had been preparing for it's own academic year, so all the freezers were already chock-full and ready to feed a campus of 2200 students while we had less than 800. As long as our generators kept us warm, we'd be able to feed ourselves through the winter and have the strength to plant crops come the spring.

Marana let everyone who wasn't a food runner or a bridge blocker rest. By now, we had more people coming, looking for a safe place. Most just passed us by, too spooked after watching Yonkers. They'd be driving a prius filled with jugs of water, food, guns and their dog, give us a once over, at our scrawny gate, shake their heads and keep going. That was fine. We wanted people who wanted us. Marana still had that stricken look, but couldn't stop. She sent parties looking for livestock. Chickens, goats, and meat rabbits were what she was looking for. Cows eat too much, their shit is worthless, they're loud, slow, they erode soils. If they were all we could find, then fine, but they'd be the first to be sacrificed when times got hard. We got lucky. A few of the local farmers wanted sanctuary and brought the chickens, goats, rabbits, feed, cages. More, they brought experience in farming and planting. And they had fruit-bearing orchards of their own that we could harvest from, assuming we could access them. The beekeeper, James, came which probably saved us, since the winters were so long. The bees and greenhouses were major.

Justin and the others came back safe. Marana was lucky, because if they hadn't, the group's trust in her leadership might have been challenged, regardless of how much support she had from the founders. Turns out the army custodial team liked the idea and even helped out when Justin asked. It almost didn't matter. Even though they'd successfully blocked off the access points on the junctions and arteries that led to campus, they had to book it back to campus with Zack on their tails. Marana had ordered people who knew how to use the tools in the theatre department shop to prepare hand weapons. Those early weapons didn't last long, but by our third year in, they were basically masters at making sturdy, efficient Zack Crackers. We needed them.


	4. Chapter 4 - Tamboli, Part 2

**Asha Tamboli:**

When the eddies of Zack crested on the horizon, we were all lined up along the fence. It was single layer, back then. Some of us were lucky enough to get some of the duct tape jackets, including me, but the guys making them could only make them so fast, and there was only so much allotted duct tape. We were all clumsy with the rebar sticks, the shovels. And the cement wasn't quite dry, yet. We'd braced the fences with some of the construction machinery, with vans and logs from the trees we had had to rip up. The sandbags were handy, too, and we had quite a few of those. But - **[takes a moment, remembering.]**

There were just so many. I'd like to say we had a cinematic moment where things felt hopeless before we suddenly got the hang of it and turned into zombie killing machines, but that's just not the case. The first couple waves, we dispatched the same day. After that, the traffic was continuous. We needed to have teams covering our southern perimeter at all times, and they were engaged at all times. **[Rolls her head and shoulders, limbering up at the memory.]** We had power in numbers, but the constant shifts for hours looking through the bars into an oncoming sea took a toll. We'd be relieved by the next shift, but we'd hear them, even in the farthest corners of campus. The only places you could shut out all the noise were in some of the basements and the soundproofed rooms in the music building. I'd come off shift, eat a couple happy meals and head to bed. I was bunked with my sister in a room meant to be a double with four others. It was cramped. The power grid shut off several days after Yonkers, and they were conserving the generators, only using them for the freezers until everything could be cleared out.

That was our existence for a few weeks. Wake up, eat, do whatever chores you'd been assigned, like storing the school's papers and records in the library, eat, do your Zack shift along the perimeter, pile some dirt along the perimeter, shaft some more Zack, eat, take a timed shower, go to sleep. Wake up, repeat.

 **The school records were that important to Marana?**

Hell, yes. Well, not Marana, specifically. Did you hear the bit where Cedar spent a good amount of her senior year typing every plan, every set of contingencies, logging all of her expenses funded by Mr. Chen and the other families, and every random thought that occurred to her? I don't know how she found time to go to class, although it sounds like Maxine and Courtney, and probably Baozhai, pitched in. They recognized that governments would do what it took to preserve themselves as an institution, first. Then, some would come for the survivors. How would survivors rebuild a life? How can societies and cultures retain heritage, their memories, when they've just splattered them all over grandma's needlework?

Did you know that we are the only, repeat, the _only_ prewar institution with near perfect records both before and during the war? We've had several survivors with connections to the school contact us for copies of our records to provide documentation that they, their daughter, wife, grandmother, whatever, owned or had family that owned land wherever. We protected student information - contact lists with their relatives and their addresses, finances, you name it. Marana didn't give a shit about the records, but she and Cedar were, like, best friends back in the day. And she admitted that preserving our past would help pave our future, as cliche it sounds. You're recording people for a reason. **[Gestures towards my recorder.]**

You see the value in an oral history, so you likely already know: American Indians had incredible histories, epic tales, creation stories, family genealogy, stored through oral tradition. Do you sit and memorize it with lines and homework? No. They tied their stories, their heritage, to the land. When their land was taken from them, their history and therefore, their identity was taken from them, too. The Founders knew they had to be pragmatic. That's why they bought every generator they could get their hands on. But they also weren't sure they wanted to survive if it meant living in a world where they wouldn't be able to raise a future without a past.

 **[We sit on a bench underneath a magnificent beech tree, where Asha briefly launches into its history, along with the school founder's grave some distance off.]**

But, you wanted to hear about winter. There's not much to say, really. It came early. It was only weeks after Yonkers when we were hit with another snowpocalypse and we were suddenly on shifts shoveling snow, looking out at a sea of frozen Zack. It was like the terracotta army had come marching on our gates. We'd shovel the snow and ice, all polluted, so the two bulldozers could clear the piles from our fences. Then, we'd go out, kill as many as we could find. We dug into a campus hillside to build a root cellar, which we'd finish in the spring. We went out and shoveled snow all fucking day, building barricades. We'd break some ice on the Connecticut river and haul buckets of river water up to the snow barricades, pour it on. It would freeze and make it virtually impossible to pass until next year. Hopefully, that would buy us time in the spring so we could both plant crops and build Perimeter Two. We were worried about more than just the dead.

 **You worried about raiders?**

To an extent, yes. For all my bragging about our great location compared to the other consortium colleges, and the city based campuses, we were still in a heavily populated region. A lot of the hordes had headed west, following the army and the civilians that followed them, but that still left a crap ton of them here, and the ones out west might find their way back. I think everyone expected tons of movie style, violent looting in an apocalypse. Well, there was looting, but it was just people looking for food. Remember Hurricane Katrina? The news went wild over reports of looters, but it was the same deal there, too. People trying to survive. The violent looting, with people stealing TVs, that's usually political. Natural disaster looting, like I saw, was almost tame. I was on a food run detail earlier, and it was all pretty orderly. One store manager actually showed up and unlocked everything for the crowd, and people just raced around, grabbing things. There were some bouts of tug-o-war, but nothing too bad. You grabbed what you could and got out; fighting only risks injury and leaves anyone dependent on you with nothing.

Yeah, we were worried about raiders, but we had an open door policy, even to the bitten. The deal was, you'd get protection, but everyone was expected to haul their ass out of bed and work, and it didn't matter if you didn't _plan_ on being a fucking farmer; if that was your assignment, that was your job. Most everyone was with the program. If you were too young to work then we had people too old to work to watch you and teach you subjects. If you were ill, you were better off asleep in bed, getting better. If you were bitten, you had a nice, if conservative, meal and a cozy bed in one of the squash courts.

 **Squash courts?**

Yeah, in our field house. Three solid walls and a fourth wall made of impact resistant glass designed to withstand repeated impacts from squash balls whizzing by. They didn't have traditional door knobs. Instead, they have these flat latches that drop down. To open them, you need to lift the latch up and away from the door and twist it. The door opened inward, so you need to pull it open while twisting the latch. Then you'd have to watch the threshold. No way can the braindead figure it out when the living struggle with them.

Anyway, we had these squash courts converted into cozier arrangements, so people could spend their final days or hours able to move their limbs freely, without the fear of eating anyone. There was no real ceiling, though. It was open up top, with a balcony overlooking the room so coaches could talk to them, I think, and it was open to the field house. We didn't need to use them during the winter, though, which was nice.

So, those were the squash courts. They drove our instructors nuts. We got a few instructors from the army during our first or second summer. They couldn't believe we would let the infected in, use resources on them, but that was our way of culling the desperate from the true raiders, the people we wouldn't be able to assuage.

The army instructors helped us build Two and Three, and spent the winters teaching us about weapon safety, running us through drills, making modifications to our protocols, that kind of thing. They were assigned to us for the duration. That fact alone gave us the hope and the confidence to think smart and long term rather than desperately. We were even designated as a legitimate Point of Contact.

 **Point of Contact?**

Yeah, for anyone in association with the government, who received even basic crash courses on operating in the field. Before they deployed, they memorized which strongholds were points of contact in their region, meaning they were either a military base with a maintenance crew, or a place like us, with military personnel assigned and therefore had a radio station. It meant that we would be the choice place to seek refuge and make a report using our transmitters. That radio station Mr. Chen paid for is probably the main component that saved our asses, apart from the perimeters. It's what brought Cedar back to our gates.

 **She visited during the war?**

Oh, yeah. A couple times, actually. Through her work as a Gopher. Turns out she was just graduating from the Air Force's basic training when Yonkers happened. Everything went to hell in a handbasket, and she was sent to a bunch of other bases to help lock them down and clear them out. Orders were constantly changing, everyone was assigned to do things completely different from the specialty they were supposed to have and people sent on errands kept being eaten and not coming back. Or they came back with a slack jaw.

Apparently, she and another guy got separated from their unit in Virginia and decided to swing up here. They found the airbase to our south was done receiving drops until the next year and neither of them wanted to wait. Told the base to radio west and let them know to expect their arrival. We helped them get a couple bikes from a bike shop, packs with proper gear, supplies, ammunition for their sidearms and a crowbar each. Off they went, banking on dropping temperatures to help them through the sea of Zack. The only reason they were let through the Rocky Pass checkpoints was because they were in uniform with dog tags. They both had family or contacts crucial to the war effort, which helped.

 **You mentioned people you couldn't convince to join you or leave you be. What happened when you couldn't assuage them?**

We eliminated them. **[Pause.]**

 **Could you elaborate?**

It goes like this. We got with the program. There was a new world order, a reshuffling of the hierarchy. Suddenly, we weren't the keystone predators, or destroyers or whatever. Either you wrapped your head around that and adapted, or you clung to the past, thinking like city idiots. That's why I can't bring myself to support the yahoos who're still trying to stick it to the government. The deck is being reshuffled again. You go with the program or you don't get to go.

Remember that one apocalypse movie? It starred this hunk of a guy who races around the world to solve some end-of-days premise. He survives by having clear traffic amidst mass hysteria, finds abandoned vehicles with exactly the right survival gear, runs into criminals with hearts of gold, gets saved by strangers, survives car crashes, plane crashes, and grievous injuries like they're no big deal. Fans of the book were pissed that just about all the source material was nixed. Point is, everyone would watch these movies with people surviving unsurvivable things and say to themselves "It'll work out, I'll be that guy." **[Silence.]**

Raiders, thieves. For the most part they were people who were just desperate. They hadn't come to terms with the fact that unless you happen to be Bear Grylls or a feral who grows up alone or whatever, then just about no one can make it alone in this new world. Especially in those early, tumultuous years. It wasn't about safety in numbers. It was about survival in numbers.

Early on, we had some stragglers who were on their way farther north, asking for handouts. We'd invite them to stay, try to explain to them that, unless they had radio contact with an established safe place farther north, their best shot was with us. Most took us up on that. We had people passing through with requests for supplies, which we mulled over, and decided to give them. We'd fill their water reserves, give them apples, leafy greens, berries, maybe a squash or a couple potatoes. We never gave them milk, eggs, grains, or any indication we had them, unless they decided to join us. A lot of them guessed, but were passing through and didn't complain.

 **So again, what happened when they didn't want to join you, and you couldn't assuage them?**

 **[Pause.]**

We couldn't allow the possibility of damage to the fence. And we definitely couldn't set the precedent of allowing our people to be terrorized. There was this group during fall, a year in. Our first winter was pretty uneventful, save the shoveling and planning. The first thaw came in May, which worried us, because we wanted to plant. We were lucky, because we had the school greenhouses, and we'd spent part of our winter securing the other school's greenhouse, for later use, in case we ever got the chance to use it. And, there were these plastic greenhouses that we'd fenced in, so it wasn't like we didn't have anything. But we had almost 800 people to feed.

We'd finished the fast food. Started working on the stored food in our school and the nearby middle and high schools. Once the snow set in, we went to the other colleges and raided their freezers, the hospitals and airports. If there's one thing I love about the old days, it's how much food we hoarded in bulk. We didn't even need to run the freezers on the generators, there was so much snow. We built little igloo rooms and stored it all in there. Saved a lot of energy that way. When April rolled around, and Courtney's contacts over the radio, both civilian and military, confirmed that winter was expected to continue, Marana got this desperate look.

So, it was fall, a year after Yonkers. We'd spent the warmer weather staving off the dead and building our cob walls, grateful we'd already set out the dirt. Come fall, she sent the people with experience in construction, who'd worked a miracle with Perimeter 1, across the river to see about deconstructing our sister school's greenhouse piece by piece. She had no intention of trying it that year, but if winters were going to last this long regularly, we'd need to adjust for that. Mark was an engineering student with a lot of time spent on the robotics team or something, so he volunteered to go with some of the other mechanically minded.

That was when this group picked Mark and his team up. I was on watch on our western perimeter. They show up at the gate and line up Mark and the other five people in his group. This guy with a brown beanie hat tells me to be a doll and get the guy in charge. I didn't feel right about leaving my watch partner, my little sister behind. But we'd just had our first freeze and she'd pulled a muscle in her leg and couldn't run very well, so I ended up going.

I found Marana in the geo lounge with Courtney, Maxine and Justin. When I told them what was up, Marana pulled on her coat, ordering Courtney to broadcast our situation. The airbase boys knew our location, of course, but otherwise, we never gave that out over the air. If people wanted to join us, we gave them coordinates to meet us, and we'd pick them up.

We got down there, I sent Bhumi away and our little entourage faced off with the yahoos. There were nine of them. It had been a long winter, a short spring and summer, and these people looked like scarecrows. Their leader, the guy with the brown beanie, started to say something, and Marana interrupted him. Told him they looked hungry. Mark looked calm enough, which meant none of our group had said anything about our supplies or how many people we had, although someone patient could always just do a stake out and count heads. She told them about our open door policy and that if people are willing to take orders and work, then they've earned a life behind solid walls.

This guy laughs and tells her he'd like to fuck her 'till she split in half. Said they knew we had a good number of people, so we had to have a good amount of food, and they wanted to take all of it in a few of the vans we had. If we didn't give it to them, they'd kill our friends.

Marana got this scary look on her face. It was a totally slack face, but it somehow felt like she was talking to an amusing child. She asked him just what he thought we'd been eating all winter. Asked him why he thought we had an open door policy and let that hang there. There were a couple of moments of silence, and it's a good thing I was bundled up, because otherwise my face would have ruined her bluff. The guy with the brown beanie kind of sputtered, but started waving his knife around, saying that in that case, we wouldn't mind if they had a couple bites. Maybe it was nerves, but he didn't seem like he was all there. He and this other guy started grabbing at Mark, pulling at his scarf.

He was down before I could figure out what was happening. Turns out Marana was quick on the draw and had hole punched Brown Beanie and the other guy between the eyes before anyone could move. Had her gun leveled at the rest of them. Mark and his team booked it.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you right now." She was pointing it at this woman who looked like she was fairly shitting herself. I was ready to pee, myself. The lady started blubbering about a hungry kid at their place, they were just trying to get by.

"So your kid matters more than everyone here?" Bang. Next one, a kid who looked like he was twelve.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you." He was really crying, and said he didn't know anyone would have to get hurt or something to that effect. After a moment, she was on to the next one, a bearded guy.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you." On it went. She ended up sparing four of them, mostly because they were all about Bhumi's age or younger. Everyone could see they were strays tagging along because they had nowhere and no one else. Marana took them in and told them if they were willing to embrace a new life, we would do the same.

 **And she felt you could trust them?**

 **[Snorts.]** No, but she had scared the living daylights out of them, and that was enough for the time being. Courtney, Justin and Professor Wells were all pretty good at setting people at ease, so Marana told them to watch over the new arrivals and help them adjust. They were too afraid of her to reciprocate anything, and it needed to stay that way. Until they truly did embrace this place, they needed to have a boogeyman inside the walls to keep them in check.

 **How did you feel about what you'd seen?**

I didn't know what to feel. I was happy my sister hadn't seen anything. Sad it only delayed the inevitable. At a pragmatic level, I felt a sense of frontier justice. A sense of righteousness that Marana responded decisively, but mercifully towards the young, though I still would have supported her if she hadn't. Mostly, I despaired that the other shoe had dropped. The world had spiraled out of control, but we had thus far maintained our innocence. Our deniability. Marana, and me for supporting her, had forfeited whatever deniability we had left. My worry was that we'd go to the assembly and find out that no one would support Marana after what she'd done.

 **How did they take it?**

I'm not entirely sure. Not well, at first. By the time the assembly started, word had spread and most knew what it was about. We met in one of the auditoriums and Marana gave a report. It was clinical and exact. She'd actually written it out. We still have her captain's logs in our archives.

 **Captain's logs? You created ranks?**

Oh, not like that. It was a joke on that old franchise, Star Trek. Cedar had left behind blank logbooks, whose purchases she had logged in her expenses log, funnily enough, for whomever was in charge to use. Even if you didn't care about the preservation of humanity's history, if you wanted to learn from your mistakes, you damn well recorded everything that happened as completely as possible. Everyone with a skill set was told to record it. And we didn't create a military rank system or anything. The founders decided that several of the respected and knowledgeable leaders would have a lot of say, and that Marana would be the ultimate voice, but there was a conscious effort to be democratic. You could be a ten-year-old and if you had a grievance or an idea with factual or moral support, you would be heard out. I guess that was also kind of like Star Trek, the pipe dream of our society.

Anyway, so that night, she stood on the stage, flashlight in hand, and read out this report. Then, she asked if anyone had anything they wanted to add to the record concerning what happened. No one did, so she asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say about the matter in general. No one did, so she asked if anyone had suggestions for better conducting future, similar, contacts. No one did, so she pulls out this other paper from behind her report and starts reading. It's a letter to whomever is in charge of the campus from Baozhai's dad, Mr. Chen, though he writes mainly as if it's just to Baozhai. It started with how Mr. Chen is mostly likely dead, and the people reading this letter want the knowledge to be prepared as a steward of this place and its people.

It goes on to say that Mr. Chen did his best to curb what happened and when that didn't work, he tried to warn people. When he failed at that, he funded the students who worked on the project. This campus was his last shot at safeguarding a future for his daughter and anyone else who lived there, so he hoped the compiled resources and supplies would serve them well. He ended it by saying that everything has a cost. When Baozhai was born, she was innocent and he, as her father, tried to preserve that innocence for as long as he could. Now, he knew he failed as a father in understanding that innocence is the price to grow stronger. If Baozhai is anything like her mother, she will find the courage to pay her fare and gain the strength to shoulder the responsibilities in living in this new world. He signed it at the end with a Chinese proverb: Women hold up half the sky.

I found out later Mr. Chen had sent the letter to Cedar, and since it was technically addressed to the leader on campus, she had put a copy of it as the foreword of the Bible.

The auditorium was silent. I know a lot of people were upset and freaked out that Marana had killed people earlier that day, and thought her a murderer. But no one else wanted the job, and realistically, everyone, even the angry ones, was relieved to have proof that they had leaders who were willing to do what it took, _whatever_ it took, to protect our walls and everyone inside.

That's one reason we got assigned instructors from the army. We never even requested any, aside from some basic preventative vaccinations. Courtney was on the radio every day swapping information, advice, the works, with anyone she could find on air. She would sometimes talk with the airbase a few miles to our south a little. I guess the boys there didn't have much else to do, other than maintain the airfield and listen in on her and anyone else on the air. They must have advocated that we receive something, since we had our shit together more than most. Certainly more than any other group in the region. The guys arrived with a small arsenal of firearms, ammunition, and drafted manuals on killing ghouls. And the immunizations, since they were the one thing we had asked for.

I think that's why we got any help at all, because we only asked for one thing, and it was small, cost-effective and served preventative purposes. We still had breakouts of illnesses that cost lives, but the vaccines were vital. The government knew we had generators, animals, a fence and walls. They knew we had realistic, effective plans for self-sufficiency, and the materials and means to do it. They knew we had stores of meds, greenhouses, untouched stockpiles of rice and various dried beans. Importantly, we were a sizable population of predominantly young, healthy, educated, able-bodied people who weren't expecting much in help, and were too busy to be bitter about it. As far as a future gene pool, I think we were an ideal investment.

And we had intact laboratories with functioning mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes, which was pretty special, even for the West Coast. We had bio and chem nerds, including a professor and a few grad students, who took samples from ghouls to compare with the uninfected would-be raiders. Governments were desperate for working labs to bounce ideas with their own people, and that made us valuable.

We only had one doctorate in that subject and a bunch of students, so no one was banking on us or willing to invest too much, but it definitely gave us an edge. When we took in the infected the following summer, we made ourselves feel more official by writing up consent forms for people to sign so they could donate their undead bodies to researching ghouls. It gave them a paper trail and the confidence that their life and death might have meaning. When they died, we set up cameras on the balconies above the squash courts and ran tests led by psychology students who had run those types of studies before.

 **[The balmy air holds a certain warmth in the late afternoon light. The school founder's gravestone, in pristine condition, stands in its gated plot. At each corner stands a granite pillar about a meter and a half tall, new additions to the campus. Upon closer inspection, each pillar is engraved with the names of historic campus leaders and founders throughout the school's history, with dates of birth and death, with some of the more modern names' death dates left blank. Among them, Mr. Chen's name is listed. The rest of the project members, mostly deceased, are also given prominence.**

 **The campus bell tolls. Classes are over for the day and chattering students head to dining halls or dormitories. Among them, professors are also eager to eat and attend the nearby school's opening celebrations. Many of the them have agreed to teach at both campuses until more faculty can be sought and hired. Asha runs a hand over the engraved names of the pillars while watching the school's current students.]**

It was like we were just college students again, working on independent studies and raiding the liquor stores for our parties during winter. We'd work our asses off year round, but every few months, usually after some close call with ghouls or an accident, we'd have a night where we'd decide to dip into our alcohol stores. The airbase boys probably hated the guys stationed with us right around then. Once some of the more ambitious students got supplies and started brewing beer, it truly felt like we were college students. Felt like we were sending proposals to some distant academic entity, and we'd receive rejection letters telling us we were under-qualified or overqualified for some unpaid internship. We were pretending to be grown up.

We'd hook up our generators to get the school servers running, and we allotted a few hours of generator time to connect with the West Coast to send our footage, analysis and findings. It also let our people have conference calls that weren't on the open air waves. The presenters would even dig out blazers, pencil skirts and ties as if it were a prewar interview. **[Grins.]** We got so many brownie points with the suits for our research. **[Sobers.]** Not sure how much good the research did, though. Years later, we still don't understand how, why, or what the fuck happened.

* * *

Author Note:

If you're familiar with New England, you will likely recognize the setting and be able to deduce which campus I picked for the setting. I deliberately didn't name it, or the other women's college, because even though there are some specific descriptions of the campus and surrounding area, I also want there to be some level of suspension from the real world.

University and college campuses, like prisons, are generally designed to be self-sufficient for varying periods of time, have their own generators, food storage, internal infrastructure and open spaces where crops could be planted. Therefore, so long as you have the hands to maintain and secure such a facility, a population could hypothetically live there indefinitely and survival probabilities may be viable.

Earlier on, I tried to figure out a plausible way for the students to defend and supply the campus without much outside help, but because of its geographic proximity to Yonkers and other major population centers, this became out of the question for the time-frame I'd given myself.

Giving Kelli Tate's interviewee a name, Mr. Chen, and having his daughter be a project member was my solution for the financials. Reliable and strong defenses require solid foundations, and with a time crunch the only way I could see a bunch of students succeeding was through external funding from Mr. Chen and other families.


End file.
